Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The biannual MTV Asia Awards is the Asian equivalent of the Europe MTV EMA. Established in 2002, the show gives recognition and awards to Asian and international icons in achievement, cinema, fashion, humanitarian, and music. Just like the EMA, most of the awards are voted for by the viewers from the Asian region. The theme for this first show is Aliens.

The latest trophy design is a gold toblerone-like bar. The twin prism shape represents the letter M and double A, the acronyms for MTV Asia Awards.

The show was canceled by Fox after the third episode, with the fourth episode being the last one broadcast. A total of six episodes had been produced, and all six were shown by the Seven Network in Australia.

Three elite alien-fighters are out to find a creature who can change its appearance at a moment's notice in this sci-fi thriller. Shaun (Olivier Gruner) is the leader of the Interceptor Force, a small band of highly-skilled soldiers who are the first line of defense in the event of a hostile attack by space aliens. When a spacecraft crash-lands in the desert, Shaun and his partners Russell (Glenn Plummer) and Dave (William Zabka) are sent in to investigate; they discover that an angry alien has arrived on Earth and that the creature has the dangerous ability to assume the form of any being it wishes -- making it all but impossible to find. Interceptor Force also stars Brad Dourif, Ernie Hudson, and Angel Boris. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Monday, January 19, 2015

When a tall, skinny comic made his late-night debut a decade ago, with his architecturally impossible orange pompadour and grinning sidekick, nobody really expected him to be able to fill the "Late Night" slot vacated by David Letterman.

Not even NBC, where "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" made its bow 10 years ago.

"The network suggested week-to-week renewals initially, which seemed unprecedented and insane," O'Brien recalls. "That wasn't a fun time for us."

But Chevy Chase's show (which coincidentally also began 10 years ago this month) was canceled by Fox after a few weeks.

And now, on the verge of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien's Tenth Anniversary Special" airing Sunday in prime time, "Conan is having the last laugh," says NBC entertainment chief Jeff Zucker. "I really cannot think of a better story in all of television."

"Going through that gauntlet, going through the thousand-mile-long spanking machine that we went through, I think, helped us earn the right to be there," O'Brien says.

At first, reviews were savage. Some called the show "roadkill."

"I thought the reviews were fair when they went after me as a performer and a late-night host because I just didn't have the confidence and the chops yet," O'Brien says. "If you looked at me in 1993, I was a young man trying very hard to do a good job at telling jokes. Well, no one wants to see that.

"But I thought that they were unfair when they attacked the comedy because I always thought the comedy was good."

Indeed, he says, "that first week of our show that was so hated, 'Year 2000,' 'Clutch Cargo,' 'Actual Items,' the Max Weinberg 7 are all there."

So was the oddball computer morphing feature "If They Mated." And to begin a decade of cutting-edge music -- which included a five-night stand of the White Stripes last spring -- the first week also included the first U.S. TV appearance by Radiohead.

Eventually, college kids began tuning in and filling the seats at Studio 6A, where Letterman once reigned and Conan now ruled.

The turning point may have come five months into the show, when Letterman himself became a guest in his own old studio.

"It was a great thing because I think it got people to come back and look at the show again who thought, 'Well, that thing's dead,' [and] you know, 'He's an idiot' and walked away," O'Brien says. "And then they came back and maybe said, 'OK, I still don't love him maybe, but Dave seems to like him so ...' So I've always been indebted to Dave for doing that.

"I think it made a big difference. I think it may have helped keep me on the air."

The following year, O'Brien took his "Clutch Cargo" act -- in which pictures of public figures are given unnaturally super-imposed mouths, as they were in the obscure 1950s cartoon -- to the White House Correspondents dinner, where President Clinton was reduced to tears watching his "Clutch Cargo" version of himself repeatedly saying "Whooeee!"

It became clear that O'Brien's skewed humor was ready for the wider world. Last year, he hosted the Emmy Awards to solid reviews. His show, which has been nominated eight times for outstanding writing, is up later this month for outstanding variety/comedy show Emmy for the first time. He's also reaching a whole new audience with next-day replays on Comedy Central at 6 p.m. weeknights.

There's much for the prime-time special Sunday to celebrate, including the first episode done entirely in clay animation last May, his performance with Bruce Springsteen and the band last December, Jim Carrey talking with Stephen Hawking via cellphone and the various adventures of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. "When Triumph went to the 'Star Wars' [movie] line [in 2002], I think that was the funniest thing on TV that year," O'Brien says.

O'Brien summarizes the special as largely "a big old pat on the back for yours truly, frankly. I don't think it's going to accomplish anything other than, 'Check out these clips of me!' and 'Here's the check.' 'Thank you!"'

Shot at New York's Beacon Theatre, the special will feature Richter, returning after he left the show three years ago; the show's music director, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, back briefly from his tour with Bruce Springsteen; and appearances from Jack Black, Will Ferrell and others.

"It's important to take an hour-and-a-half and say, 'Look what we've done.' I think we've done some really great late-night television that stands up to all the good late-night television of the last 50 years on NBC," O'Brien says.

"And who knows? It may pay dividends when NBC and I have a big falling out in about a year-and-a-half. Because then it's, 'UPN, here I come!"

"The Late Night With Conan O'Brien Tenth Anniversary Special" is on Sunday at 9:30 p.m. on NBC (locally on WVIT, Channel 30). "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" airs weeknights at 12:35 on NBC and repeats on Comedy Central weeknights at 6.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

The SciFi Channel presents a TV spectacular honoring the best homemade satires of the Star Wars universe from Lucasfilm's first Offical Star Wars Fan Film Awards. Showcases all the award-winners, from Star Wars-themed spoofs to documentaries and mockumentaries.

Variety reports that viewers weren't exactly ecstatic for the "Married By America" series opener. The two-hour premiere netted a third-place 4.1 rating/10 share in the coveted adults 18-49 demographic.

From 9PM to 10PM, its regular slot, "Married" placed third in the demographic (4.0/9, 8.67 million viewers overall) -- behind NBC's combo of "Fear Factor" and "Meet My Folks" (6.3/15) and repeats of CBS comedies "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Still Standing" (5.2/12). Ratings for "Married" also tailed off in its final half-hour.

While these would certainly be respectable premiere numbers for most series -- it topped ABC's "The Practice" (2.7/6) and far exceeded what Fox's dismal "Girls Club" averaged last fall (2.3/5) -- they pale next to "Joe Millionaire," a limited-run megahit that produced some of the biggest ratings in Fox history. Fox hopes that the seven-week "Married" can generate more viewer interest in coming weeks, as it shifts from more of a gameshow to a relationship series.

An annual awards show airing on the Fox Network. The awards honor the year's biggest achievements in music, movies, sports, TV, fashion, and more, voted by teen viewers. Winners receive a full size surfboard designed with the graphics of that year's show.

The 2001 Teen Choice Awards were held on August 12, 2001, at the Gibson Amphitheatre, Universal City, California. The event didn't have a designated host with Shaggy, Aaron Carter & Nick Carter, Nelly, Usher, Eve & Gwen Stefani, and BBMak as performers.

From Miami Beach this was a show with people partying and dancing around a stage on which various events took place such as bikini contests. With Lance Krall and DJ Skribble providing dance music for the party goers.

This two-part TV miniseries, adapted from Dorothy West's novel The Wedding, takes a look at mid-century issues of race and class in well-to-do black society. On Martha's Vineyard in 1953, debutante Shelby Coles (Halle Berry) stirs discord in her social-climbing family when she chooses to marry impoverished white musician Meade Howell (Eric Thal). At the Shelby family estate, weeks prior to the wedding, Meade informs her parents, Corinne and Clark Coles (Lynn Whitfield, Michael Warren), that his family won't be attending the wedding, and the irony of upper-crust blacks being rejected by poor whites hangs heavy. In a later plot twist, the single black father (Carl Lumbly) of three mixed-race daughters takes a very strong interest in Shelby that quickly turns into an overly persistent pursuit. Filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, the miniseries premiered February 22-23, 1998 on ABC. Also known as Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi

Monday, January 12, 2015

The 71st Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and American television of 2013, was broadcast live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 12, 2014, by NBC, as part of the 2013-14 film awards season. The ceremony was produced by Dick Clark Productions in association with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Woody Allen was announced as the Cecil B. DeMille Award honoree for his lifetime achievements on September 13, 2013, and Diane Keaton accepted the award for him. On October 15, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were announced as the co-hosts for the second time in a row and as the co-hosts for the 72nd Golden Globe Awards. The nominations were announced on December 12, 2013, by Aziz Ansari, Zoe Saldana and Olivia Wilde. American Hustle, Behind the Candelabra, Breaking Bad, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Dallas Buyers Club were among the films and television shows that received multiple awards.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

The World Music Awards is an international awards show founded in 1989 under the high patronage of Albert II, Prince of Monaco and is based in Monte-Carlo. Awards are presented to the world's best-selling artists in the various categories and to the best-selling artists from each major territory. Sales figures are provided by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Nine awards are voted online by the public. The awards are gold-plated, each depicting an artist holding the world.

Live coverage of the Fourth of July parade from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The broadcast features a parade with Disney characters, floats, dancers, military bands, a Disney electric light parade, formation flying by the Navy's Blue Angels, previews of new Disney World attractions, and a fireworks and laser light finale.

She really made a mess of it, didn't she? As far as the British people are concerned, says Bob Houston, editor and publisher of Royalty magazine, "She's dead." There are those who say that although Fergie hastened her demise by breaking numerous rules of royal protocol, she really never had a chance, ground up by a group of palace powerbrokers known as "the Queen Machine." That's the way the royal soap opera -- which Houston likens to "Dynasty with crowns" -- plays out in NBC's "Fergie & Andrew: Behind the Palace Doors." Houston, who served as consultant on the made-for-TV movie, scheduled for Monday night at 9 (locally on WVIT, Channel 30), certainly sees it that way. "You had the initial period where she was a breath of fresh air blowing all the cobwebs away," says Houston from his office in London, "and then suddenly everything was against her." The crowning blow came this summer when photos that showed Fergie cavorting topless with a Texas millionaire hit the tabloids.

Sam Miller and Pippa Henchley, two British actors virtually unknown in this country, play the Duke and Duchess of York in NBC's behind-the-scenes look at this royal mess of a marriage. (The film was finished before the photos turned up.) "Fergie & Andrew," which will not be shown in England, is just one of several malice-in-the-palace movies headed for the small screen this season. Waiting in the wings at NBC is a four-hour miniseries based on Andrew Morton's bubble-bursting bio "Diana: Her True Story." (Morton was also a consultant on "Fergie & Andrew.") CBS has the three-hour "The Women of Windsor" scheduled for Nov. 1. And later this season ABC has a real-life blueblood, former "Dynasty" star Catherine Oxenberg (who launched her career with the 1983 TV film "The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana") back as Diana in "Charles and Diana: A Palace Divided." (Roger Rees of "Cheers" fame plays Charles.) Houston, who founded Royalty 11 years ago, when Charles and Diana were married and the world went gaga, says, "The media and the royal family boil down to two periods. There is BD and AD -- before Diana and after Diana. If you came here and went through all the archives of all the tabloids in the '70s, you'd hardly find a royal story in them." But for the last six months, he says, Fleet Street tabloids have been involved in a circulation-driven feeding frenzy, "all based on very little to chew on, actually." Royalty magazine, a monthly that Houston calls "the Rolling Stone of the Royals," has a tidier approach, although its editor insists it's no fanzine. "There's a great argument here raging about privacy," he says, adding that his magazine would never, for example, publish topless shots of Fergie."Couldn't afford them, for one thing," he says, joking. But he also says you have to go back to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII, who gave up the crown for the love of Wallis Simpson, to match the shock the Fergie pictures had on royal loyalists. "There's very heavy negotiations going on about the separation, custody of children, etc.," says Houston, "and what the topless pictures did was to destroy whatever hand Sarah thought she might have had."

Much of the background in NBC's "Fergie & Andrew" is straight out of Royalty magazine's quarterly "Collectors Edition," titled "Crown in Crisis." And, echoing the movie's theme, Houston explains, "There was a faction within the queen machine who never thought Fergie was the right stuff. So the idea was give her enough rope, and she'll hang herself. "She shot herself in the foot several times along the way," Houston adds, "but she should only have been allowed to shoot herself in the foot once." By comparison, Diana, who has had more than her share of embarrassing tabloid headlines (case in point, the Diana telephone tapes) hasn't suffered any real loss of popularity. "Diana's popularity was totally undimmed, and so was the queen's," Houston reports. "I wouldn't say the same of poor old Fergie." The reason, he says, is simple. Diana (Edita Brychta in the film) is the future queen, "a combination of Mother Teresa and Michelle Pfeiffer," and her children future kings. "Fergie and Andrew in that respect are bit players," says Houston. Surprisingly, the Scottish-born editor -- perhaps a bit of a palace loyalist -- thinks a year from now people will look back on all the scandals and wonder what all the fuss was about. "I think the worst is over, and the worst was never as bad as people thought it was," he says, adding that the scandals have in fact spurred a necessary discussion on many issues concerning Buckingham Palace, including whether the queen should pay taxes. The kingdom, the monarchs will survive, says Houston. Charles and Diana will go on leading separate lives together. Fergie and Andrew are another story -- one without a fairy tale ending. "I don't think there is a future for Andrew and Sarah as a couple at all," Houston says. "Everything was killed stone dead by those pictures." But, he adds -- as if anyone might have doubts -- "she won't be dead as far as the tabloids are concerned."

In this independent feature directed by Fritzi Horstman, a group of 20-somethings stage their own 1990s version of The Big Chill by engaging in a frenzied weekend of bed-hopping. Ali (Frederika Keston) is a young woman who has more romantic opportunities than she can cope with. During the course of a few nights, she and her two female roommates find themselves visited by old and new male friends, including Ali's current lover, two of her former boyfriends, and a wisecracking, brooding poet. The revelers themselves make reference to the similarity of their roundelay to the action in The Big Chill. Ali becomes increasingly disoriented and incapable of choosing the right romantic path. Horstman wrote the script and produced the low-budget indie film, which was her feature debut, in 1997. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi

Dark Smith is an alienated, 18-year-old young man struggling with daily life, fluctuating romantic status with his bisexual, polyamorous girlfriend Mel and conflicting feelings for a shy gay classmate, Montgomery. The day starts off normally enough with Dark meeting up with his friends which include the intelligent Dingbat, Montgomery, Mel and her purple-haired, acid-tongued lesbian lover Lucifer for breakfast at their local coffeehouse hangout, The Hole. Various mentions of a party at Jujyfruit's along with plans for a drug-fueled game of kick-the-can are made and the story segues into portions of the goings-on of the lives of other characters.

Ray Sharkey as a Boston police captain in a starched blue uniform is an incredulous image. That's because Sharkey has nailed down the market on feral con artists. And sure enough, he turns out to be a corrupt cop in NBC's "Good Cops, Bad Cops" (Sunday at 9 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39), a moderately compelling, fact-based yarn about a group of Boston's finest who pulled off what may be history's biggest bank heist (some $25 million in cash and jewels).

Ed Asner plays a police official who from the start is wise to Sharkey's scam-laden character (based on the real-life Gerry Clemente, who from his cell wrote the book "The Cops Are Robbers," on which scenarist Bill Bleich based his teleplay).

Director Paul Wendkos and a gritty cast of actors, including bad guys Steve Railsback and James Keach, dramatize a nervy and literally almost leisurely three-day bank robbery masterminded by a cool group of Boston policemen over the Memorial Day weekend in 1980.

They get away with it too. That's the first hour of the show, and it's staged with enough veracity that, as with so many daring capers, you find yourself pulling for the gangsters. The last hour is equally arresting and implacable as the thieves, who know no honor among themselves, of course, fall into the fatal trap of mutual distrust.

Sharkey's performance, which is convincingly measured instead of merely hyper, is quite good and it anchors the show. There's no violence as such until the end, a vermilion moment that unflinchingly lingers on a gunshot victim as he crawls home a bloody pulp. The scene is unusually graphic but a casebook example of violence dramatized for the right reasons.

Supporting actors Bobby Kellog (an undercover cop who underscores the pressure from the Asner character for cops to rat on other cops) and Robert F. Lyons (as the gang's alarm system magician) earmark the attention to character detail.

Sex and science fiction are again combined in this sophomoric fantasy set somewhere in the future in an unnamed US city. The tale begins as the media announces the unwelcome arrival of an alien spacecraft, from which a beautiful Asian woman disembarks. She has come to the gang-ravaged city for a little vacation. The head of the city's police regime, General Hayden, wants to catch her and get rid of the gangs simultaneously. To do so, he sounds an earthquake alarm and then orders a mass evacuation of the town. Only the police and the gangs remain, and it is lucky Officer Weed who gets to meet the toothsome alien Amelia first. Since her arrival, Amelia has changed herself into a seductive black woman in a silver metallic suit. Unable to resister her bountiful charms, Weed and she do the nasty, and he learns that among her many talents is her ability to change into any kind of woman she wants to be; he also learns that she needs sex like he needs food. Lucky her, she found a veritable banquet in the lusty Weed. Meanwhile, the gang wars rage on. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi